Casino Jack

We finally rented Casino Jack last night. Kevin Spacey does a kickass performance as Jack Abramoff. Kelly Preston played his wife, and Jon Lovitz was also in it. Other than that I hadn’t seen or heard of most of the actors. The actors that I hadn’t heard of were pretty good likenesses of Karl Rove, Ralph Reed, Tom DeLay, Grover Norquist and the rest of the sleazebags involved in this whole scandal.

The movie actually portrayed Jack Abramoff as a somewhat sympathetic character, at least as far as slippery power-crazed lobbyists go. Kevin Spacey got a Golden Globe nomination for his performance.

The movie is well worth renting. It’s good that an important chapter in our recent history can be kept alive with an entertaining movie.

Sort of the opposite of Fair Game, with Naomi Watts playing Valerie Plame and Sean Penn playing her husband, Joseph Wilson. I waited months for this to come out on DVD, figuring that a movie starring two of the best actors out there, dramatizing one of the most disgraceful scandals of the Dumbya years, would have to be riveting. Wrong!

I don’t know how they managed, but Fair Game was drier than the wonkiest PBS documentary.

But check out Casino Jack if you haven’t seen it already.